Prove It Isn’t the Same Bird

I’m writing this part after the fact. I want you to know that. Because what just happened is going to sound like I made it up to fit the essay and I didn’t.

I was outside an hour ago in the yard recording the birds for two minutes on my phone.

I came inside. I opened a document. I started writing about a crow.

A crow landed outside the window.

I’m not saying it’s the same crow. I’m saying I have no way to know it isn’t.

So let me tell you about the hawks.

Two years ago on Mulholland there was a hawk sitting on a post, watching me walk past. I stopped. My far-sightedness had a showdown at the OK CORRAL with his.. then he flew.

A few months after that I’m driving down Mulholland and I come around a corner and there’s a hawk standing in the road. Standing. In the road. We stopped the car. It looked at us. It eventually moved.

A few months after that I’m sitting in my yard and a hawk lands on the fence ten feet from me. Just lands. Looks at me. Stays a long time.

Last week I went outside to think and a hawk flew over the house.

Four hawks across two years. Or one hawk four times.

How would I know.

I wouldn’t know. Nobody would know. The ornithologist couldn’t prove it. The wildlife biologist couldn’t prove it. The guy who runs the raptor sanctuary in Topanga couldn’t prove it. Nobody tagged my hawk. The hawk doesn’t have a barcode.

So let’s play the game.

What if it’s the same bird.

There’s a giant raven that sits outside my back door in Hollywood. Enormous. The kind of raven that looks at you like it’s running the meeting. I knew a raven exactly like that in Fort St. John. Prove to me it isn’t the same one.

Prove it isn’t the same hummingbird that floated in front of your face at Sylvan Lake when you were nine. Prove it isn’t the same crow that watched your mother bring you home from the hospital. Prove it isn’t the same sparrow that was on the fence the morning your dad built the fence and the morning you got married and the morning your dog came home.

You can’t prove it. You can only assume it. And the assumption is doing a lot of work.

Once you start pulling on it the whole thing comes apart. Bird lifespans. Bird bones. The reason you’ve never stepped on a bird skeleton in your life. The mask experiment that proved a raven can hate you for five years. What Hilma af Klint painted in 1915 that the art world couldn’t look at for a hundred years. And the thing about the sparrow on your fence that I keep thinking about and can’t stop.

And I’ve never heard a person ask this question before it occurred to me for the first time last night.